6 little words helped make George H.W. Bush (one term) President: NPR

Rarely six words mean so much and so many different things.

They sounded in the Superdome of New Orleans in August 1988 as Vice President of the United States, George HW Bush, accepted the Republican nomination for the presidency:

"Read my lips: no new taxes. "

And the crowd, as they say, is unleashed. Even in this vast and airy stage, a roar sounded as Bush prepared his pay line:

"My opponent does not rule out raising taxes, but I will, and Congress will push me to increase them and I will say no, and they will grow, and I will say no, and they will grow again, and I will say to them: " Read me on the lips: no new taxes." "

This speech contained other memorable moments, written by President Ronald Reagan's speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. The "thousand points of light", soon to be famous, were mentioned, as well as a reference to a "gentler and gentler nation". Both would follow George H. W. Bush for the rest of his life.

But it's the "read my lips" message that has inflamed the convention and caught the attention of the media . Talking hard was not Bush's usual job. He was much more associated with Reagan, the movie actor, who, as a politician, borrowed from time to time to movie scripts. A few years ago, Reagan had delighted his fans by citing a film by Clint Eastwood, in which a policeman armed with a very big gun mocked a criminal who was crawling towards a nearby gun: "Go ahead," said Dirty. Harry. "Make my day."

Thus, when Reagan was confronted with Democrats and other "tax auggers" in Congress, he raised the line to dramatize his threat of veto.

Where does the phrase

"Read my lips" looked like a movie, but it did not work not a Clint movie. William Safire searched for the phrase from his column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Safire was a lexicographer, political editorialist and former speechwriter for President Richard Nixon.

He found the first widely public use of the phrase in a song title in 1957 (by Joe Greene), then in a 1978 album title (from singer Tim Curry) and in several 1980s song titles He then migrated into the world of sports and sports clichés, from which it took a short step forward for political speech.

A Reagan collaborator used it in 1981 about the release of American hostages held by Iran and even by Senator Al Gore of Tennessee in congressional matters.

Safire concludes that the sentence simply meant "listen well" or "understand me well".

What was important, however, was that it sounded hard. Bush, too often, did not do it. In fact, his campaign had suffered from a problem of perception of his manhood.

Newsweek described the former World War II fighter pilot and university baseball player on a folded boat bearing the title "Fighting the Wimp Factor." "This is something that the The editor of this article now says he was wrong, but during the 1988 campaign, it was a story that was stuck – and Bush's main task in his speech of the New Orleans convention was to dispel this image all following .

That helped … then probably hurt

"Read my lips" was successful, probably beyond their most cherished dreams. Polls showed that after the convention, Bush had a run ahead of Democrat Michael Dukakis. But if it improved Bush's chances of being elected that year, it might also have ruined his chances of being re-elected in 1992.

That's because less than two years after promising not to pay taxes, Bush found himself in difficult circumstances. in which he no longer felt that he could keep it. Stuck in budget negotiations with the majority of Democrats in the House and Senate, Bush felt he had to allow higher rates on some existing taxes, if not the bill to reduce the Gramm-Rudman deficit put an end to important government services.

He therefore signed a compromise involving income and spending restrictions. The Democrats exulted forcing him to retreat. The Conservatives cried. A young Newt Gingrich, ranked second among Republican leaders in the House the year before, did not hide his dissatisfaction. He insisted that any option was preferable to any new source of income.

This position inspired a Republican major rival to the Bush renomination in 1992. It was Patrick Buchanan, former Reagan speechwriter and familiar commentator on television. In December 1991, he announced his campaign for the post of president. He presented himself "because we Republicans can no longer say that everything is the fault of the Liberals." It's not a Liberal Democrat who said: "Read my lips: no new tax , & # 39; then broke his promise to sign a devious budget deal with Capitol Hill's big spenders. "

Reagan and Bush won two landslides on an anti-communist, anti-abortion and anti-tax platform. World events significantly reduced the communist threat in 1990 and Bush devoted little of his time and energy to the issue of abortion. That left taxes behind and the fact that Bush is also abandoning this citadel was a scandal for many people on the right. Buchanan had sufficiently burned Bush's stomach during the first primaries for the president to apologize for his tax deferral in several interviews in the spring of 1992.

But if he would have acted differently retrospectively is a another question. In July 1990, the federal government assumed a new obligation to bail out those injured by the collapse of the savings and credit sector. The annual budget deficit had already risen to $ 200 billion a year and the combined national debt had risen from $ 1 trillion in 1980 (the date of Reagan's first election to Bush) to $ 2.7 trillion.

That same month, the recession economy that was sure to reduce revenue. And the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was about to invade neighboring Kuwait, which would trigger the first Persian Gulf War

Bush knew that it was time to put order in the public finances of the country. Its 1990 compromise marked the beginning of a decade of relatively responsible budgeting that, combined with the measures taken by the Clinton administration in 1993, allowed the federal government to derive considerable revenue from the personal computer boom of this decade.

As the year 2000 approached, the stock market was booming and the annual budget deficit was almost nil. Nevertheless, the risk that Bush consciously took with the budget deal turned out to be worse than he thought. He resisted criticism from Gingrich and the Buchanan Challenge and was renamed in 1992. But he received less than 38% of the popular vote in November.

The winner is Clinton, who benefits from the depressed turnout of the GOP. Nearly one fifth of the votes cast goes to a third party candidate, businessman H. Ross Perot, who is fighting the budget deficit and the national debt. [19659044] [ad_2]
Source link